Missing HD space on laptop

So we are looking for appr. 37GBs that is neither in the files nor on the shadowstorage. That will be an interesting chase for an elephant. Let's see the WinDirStat picture.

Ok. Here are the files that show the issue.

Explorer, Disk Mgmt, Restore, VSSAdmin and WinDirStat

Ran WinDirStat as admin.
Also had run chkdsk and no issues were found

Machine has 3 users set up and I logged in as Admin.
Win-7 Prof 64 bit
AVG Anti-Virus
Use Erunt for Registry backups
Use Auslogics for defrag

On the WinDirStat picture, the two big red areas are probably your pagefile and your hiberfile. If you do not use hibernation, you can get rid of the hiberfile with this command:

powecfg -h off

That will save you 3GBs. The pagefile could be reduced to 2GBs. Saves another 2GB.

But what is that big grey area in the middle. I cannot quite tell. Click on it and it should tell you in the upper pane.

But none of that explains the 37GBs that are missing. Open the C partition and look whether you see anything big and suspicious in there. You will have to open the folders or look at the properties of the folders in order to see the size. Anything "log" would catch my attention.

whs said:

On the WinDirStat picture, the two big red areas are probably your pagefile and your hiberfile. If you do not use hibernation, you can get rid of the hiberfile with this command:

powecfg -h off

That will save you 3GBs. The pagefile could be reduced to 2GBs. Saves another 2GB.

True. Since I use hibernate (to keep battery usage low when compared to Sleep), I do not mind keeping the hibernate file as is. Can definitely reduce the pagefile size.

whs said:

But what is that big grey area in the middle. I cannot quite tell. Click on it and it should tell you in the upper pane.

That is the free space ~ 10GB

whs said:

But none of that explains the 37GBs that are missing. Open the C partition and look whether you see anything big and suspicious in there. You will have to open the folders or look at the properties of the folders in order to see the size. Anything "log" would catch my attention.

Yes, that is the issue that I'm facing right now. More than pagefile or hibernate file. Instead of 37GB, I think it is more around 27GB. You might be adding the 10GB of free space in there as missing.

will try and search for *log* and see what it returns.

thanks,

That is the free space ~ 10GB

That is strange. Normally WinDirStat lists only files/folders. That must be a file too.

will try and search for *log* and see what it returns.

Don't only search for log stuff but for anything that could be big and suspicious. You have to do that 'manually',.

No, go to Computer and double click on the C partition. Then you see all the folders and files in your system. It will look something like in my picture. For the files, the size is on the right side but folders you have to open or look at the properties (which is easier). If you see a big chunk, look further.